Tag Archives | tax

Is The Government Indirectly Imposing A New Tax on Gas?

By Rami on March 31, 2016 in Lebanon

gas price

Following the huge decrease in gasoline prices during the last year, there has been a lot of talk about the possibility for he government to fix the price at 22,000L.L per 20 liters or introduce a new tax of 5,000L.L to increase the revenue, but it was claimed a couple of months ago that the cabinet is not going to approve such thing and we all got relieved.

However, it seems like the tax is going to be gradually imposed one way or another. Over the past 3 weeks, the price of gasoline has increased by 1,700L.L even though the price of crude oil decreased from $41.5 to $38.3 over the same period.

What’s also worse is that the media is not reaching out to the ministry of energy to inquire about these increases, but you really can’t blame them when Ahlam and Adel Karam are keeping them busy with their nonsense…!

So why did mobile prices suddenly increase?!

By Rami on August 19, 2014 in Lebanon

iphone5s

If you have been following smartphone prices in Lebanon over the past couple of weeks then you might have noticed the weird increase on all handsets.

For some unknown reason, prices have increased by around 10% in the latest price list published by Amhaz (Stars Communications) and are now similar to the prices during the period when the government cracked down on smugglers by requiring IMEI registration. The table below shows the difference between the prices on August 6th and 18th for some selected devices.

prices

I’m not sure whether this has anything to do to with the U.S. sanctions Amhaz was hit by a while ago or it is actually due to some extra control exercised by the Lebanese government on smugglers to make them pay the due taxes, but it’s definitely weird since nothing about this matter was mentioned in the media.

Mobile phone prices in Lebanon increasing already

By Rami on June 1, 2013 in Lebanon

mobile phones

As you all know, and in order to stop mobile phones smuggling in Lebanon, the ministry of telecommunications is now requiring all traders to register the IMEI (a unique ID assigned to each mobile device) of every legally imported mobile phone or tablet.

The collected IMEIs will then be used as of today June 1st to filter the devices that are allowed access to our mobile networks (alfa and touch). So typically speaking, a legally imported mobile phone with its due taxes paid will be allowed to connect to the mobile networks, while other smuggled ones will be denied access since their unique identifiers are not registered at the ministry.

The weakest ring in the process is of course the group of people who will be responsible of the data entry of the registered IMEIs. Since they will be easily able to register and IMEI of some untaxed mobile if there was not much control over them.

As a result, mobile phone prices ended up notably increasing over the last week. For instance, the guy who sold me my mobile was listing the iPhone 16 GB for around $650 since mid-May I guess, then he increased the price 2 days ago to $745. Logically due to the fact that the handsets he’s currently offering were legally imported and subject to some import tax.

Everybody is eventually complaining about all of this, especially that it gets a bit complicated when you buy some used handset from abroad. And I know it’s wrong to complain about a price increase when it’s a result of complying with the government taxation rules, but still, a $100 increase totally sucks!

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Tag Archives | tax